Data-driven Precipitation Nowcasting Using Satellite Imagery

Accurate precipitation forecasting is crucial for early warnings of disasters, such as floods and landslides. Traditional forecasts rely on ground-based radar systems, which are space-constrained and have high maintenance costs. Consequently, most developing countries depend on a global numerical model with low resolution, instead of operating their own radar systems. To mitigate this gap, we propose the Neural Precipitation Model (NPM), which uses global-scale geostationary satellite imagery. NPM predicts precipitation for up to six hours, with an update every hour. We take three key channels to discriminate rain clouds as input: infrared radiation (at a wavelength of 10.5 $\mu m$), upper- (6.3 $\mu m$), and lower- (7.3 $\mu m$) level water vapor channels. Additionally, NPM introduces positional encoders to capture seasonal and temporal patterns, accounting for variations in precipitation. Our experimental results demonstrate that NPM can predict rainfall in real-time with a resolution of 2 km. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/seominseok0429/Data-driven-Precipitation-Nowcasting-Using-Satellite-Imagery.

Masked Autoregressive Model for Weather Forecasting

The growing impact of global climate change amplifies the need for accurate and reliable weather forecasting. Traditional autoregressive approaches, while effective for temporal modeling, suffer from error accumulation in long-term prediction tasks. The lead time embedding method has been suggested to address this issue, but it struggles to maintain crucial correlations in atmospheric events. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Masked Autoregressive Model for Weather Forecasting (MAM4WF). This model leverages masked modeling, where portions of the input data are masked during training, allowing the model to learn robust spatiotemporal relationships by reconstructing the missing information. MAM4WF combines the advantages of both autoregressive and lead time embedding methods, offering flexibility in lead time modeling while iteratively integrating predictions. We evaluate MAM4WF across weather, climate forecasting, and video frame prediction datasets, demonstrating superior performance on five test datasets.

ACE Metric: Advection and Convection Evaluation for Accurate Weather Forecasting

Recently, data-driven weather forecasting methods have received significant attention for surpassing the RMSE performance of traditional NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction)-based methods. However, data-driven models are tuned to minimize the loss between forecasted data and ground truths, often using pixel-wise loss. This can lead to models that produce blurred outputs, which, despite being significantly different in detail from the actual weather conditions, still demonstrate low RMSE values. Although evaluation metrics from the computer vision field, such as PSNR, SSIM, and FVD, can be used, they are not entirely suitable for weather variables. This is because weather variables exhibit continuous physical changes over time and lack the distinct boundaries of objects typically seen in computer vision images. To resolve these issues, we propose the advection and convection Error (ACE) metric, specifically designed to assess how well models predict advection and convection, which are significant atmospheric transfer methods. We have validated the ACE evaluation metric on the WeatherBench2 and MovingMNIST datasets.

Long-Term Typhoon Trajectory Prediction: A Physics-Conditioned Approach Without Reanalysis Data

In the face of escalating climate changes, typhoon intensities and their ensuing damage have surged. Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for effective damage control. Traditional physics-based models, while comprehensive, are computationally intensive and rely heavily on the expertise of forecasters. Contemporary data-driven methods often rely on reanalysis data, which can be considered to be the closest to the true representation of weather conditions. However, reanalysis data is not produced in real-time and requires time for adjustment because prediction models are calibrated with observational data. This reanalysis data, such as ERA5, falls short in challenging real-world situations. Optimal preparedness necessitates predictions at least 72 hours in advance, beyond the capabilities of standard physics models. In response to these constraints, we present an approach that harnesses real-time Unified Model (UM) data, sidestepping the limitations of reanalysis data. Our model provides predictions at 6-hour intervals for up to 72 hours in advance and outperforms both state-of-the-art data-driven methods and numerical weather prediction models. In line with our efforts to mitigate adversities inflicted by \rthree{typhoons}, we release our preprocessed \textit{PHYSICS TRACK} dataset, which includes ERA5 reanalysis data, typhoon best-track, and UM forecast data.

Deterministic Guidance Diffusion Model for Probabilistic Weather Forecasting

Weather forecasting requires not only accuracy but also the ability to perform probabilistic prediction. However, deterministic weather forecasting methods do not support probabilistic predictions, and conversely, probabilistic models tend to be less accurate. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce the \textbf{\textit{D}}eterministic \textbf{\textit{G}}uidance \textbf{\textit{D}}iffusion \textbf{\textit{M}}odel (DGDM) for probabilistic weather forecasting, integrating benefits of both deterministic and probabilistic approaches. During the forward process, both the deterministic and probabilistic models are trained end-to-end. In the reverse process, weather forecasting leverages the predicted result from the deterministic model, using as an intermediate starting point for the probabilistic model. By fusing deterministic models with probabilistic models in this manner, DGDM is capable of providing accurate forecasts while also offering probabilistic predictions. To evaluate DGDM, we assess it on the global weather forecasting dataset (WeatherBench) and the common video frame prediction benchmark (Moving MNIST). We also introduce and evaluate the Pacific Northwest Windstorm (PNW)-Typhoon weather satellite dataset to verify the effectiveness of DGDM in high-resolution regional forecasting. As a result of our experiments, DGDM achieves state-of-the-art results not only in global forecasting but also in regional forecasting. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/DongGeun-Yoon/DGDM}.

Prototype-oriented Unsupervised Change Detection for Disaster Management

Climate change has led to an increased frequency of natural disasters such as floods and cyclones. This emphasizes the importance of effective disaster monitoring. In response, the remote sensing community has explored change detection methods. These methods are primarily categorized into supervised techniques, which yield precise results but come with high labeling costs, and unsupervised techniques, which eliminate the need for labeling but involve intricate hyperparameter tuning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised change detection method named Prototype-oriented Unsupervised Change Detection for Disaster Management (PUCD). PUCD captures changes by comparing features from pre-event, post-event, and prototype-oriented change synthesis images via a foundational model, and refines results using the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Although PUCD is an unsupervised change detection, it does not require complex hyperparameter tuning. We evaluate PUCD framework on the LEVIR-Extension dataset and the disaster dataset and it achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other methods on the LEVIR-Extension dataset.

Improved Flood Insights: Diffusion-Based SAR to EO Image Translation

Driven by rapid climate change, the frequency and intensity of flood events are increasing. Electro-Optical (EO) satellite imagery is commonly utilized for rapid response. However, its utilities in flood situations are hampered by issues such as cloud cover and limitations during nighttime, making accurate assessment of damage challenging. Several alternative flood detection techniques utilizing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data have been proposed. Despite the advantages of SAR over EO in the aforementioned situations, SAR presents a distinct drawback: human analysts often struggle with data interpretation. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces a novel framework, Diffusion-Based SAR to EO Image Translation (DSE). The DSE framework converts SAR images into EO images, thereby enhancing the interpretability of flood insights for humans. Experimental results on the Sen1Floods11 and SEN12-FLOOD datasets confirm that the DSE framework not only delivers enhanced visual information but also improves performance across all tested flood segmentation baselines.

Implicit Stacked Autoregressive Model for Video Prediction

Future frame prediction has been approached through two primary methods: autoregressive and non-autoregressive. Autoregressive methods rely on the Markov assumption and can achieve high accuracy in the early stages of prediction when errors are not yet accumulated. However, their performance tends to decline as the number of time steps increases. In contrast, non-autoregressive methods can achieve relatively high performance but lack correlation between predictions for each time step. In this paper, we propose an Implicit Stacked Autoregressive Model for Video Prediction (IAM4VP), which is an implicit video prediction model that applies a stacked autoregressive method. Like non-autoregressive methods, stacked autoregressive methods use the same observed frame to estimate all future frames. However, they use their own predictions as input, similar to autoregressive methods. As the number of time steps increases, predictions are sequentially stacked in the queue. To evaluate the effectiveness of IAM4VP, we conducted experiments on three common future frame prediction benchmark datasets and weather\&climate prediction benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Simple Baseline for Weather Forecasting Using Spatiotemporal Context Aggregation Network

Traditional weather forecasting relies on domain expertise and computationally intensive numerical simulation systems. Recently, with the development of a data-driven approach, weather forecasting based on deep learning has been receiving attention. Deep learning-based weather forecasting has made stunning progress, from various backbone studies using CNN, RNN, and Transformer to training strategies using weather observations datasets with auxiliary inputs. All of this progress has contributed to the field of weather forecasting; however, many elements and complex structures of deep learning models prevent us from reaching physical interpretations. This paper proposes a SImple baseline with a spatiotemporal context Aggregation Network (SIANet) that achieved state-of-the-art in 4 parts of 5 benchmarks of W4C22. This simple but efficient structure uses only satellite images and CNNs in an end-to-end fashion without using a multi-model ensemble or fine-tuning. This simplicity of SIANet can be used as a solid baseline that can be easily applied in weather forecasting using deep learning.

Domain Generalization Strategy to Train Classifiers Robust to Spatial-Temporal Shift

Deep learning-based weather prediction models have advanced significantly in recent years. However, data-driven models based on deep learning are difficult to apply to real-world applications because they are vulnerable to spatial-temporal shifts. A weather prediction task is especially susceptible to spatial-temporal shifts when the model is overfitted to locality and seasonality. In this paper, we propose a training strategy to make the weather prediction model robust to spatial-temporal shifts. We first analyze the effect of hyperparameters and augmentations of the existing training strategy on the spatial-temporal shift robustness of the model. Next, we propose an optimal combination of hyperparameters and augmentation based on the analysis results and a test-time augmentation. We performed all experiments on the W4C22 Transfer dataset and achieved the 1st performance.